custom cluster cabinets (was Re: 1U P4 Systems)
Bari Ari
bari at onelabs.com
Tue May 29 08:46:37 PDT 2001
Douglas Eadline wrote:
> Keep in mind there is no easy way to correlate dense CPUs or MFLOPS per
> watt to actual performance. Packing CPUs in a custom 1U box
> may be a big win for some problems, but a big waste of money
> for others.
>
The StoneSoup BeoClusters will always be the best approach for many as
others have pointed out here due to budget, reuse and
management/organizational constraints.
> Also, the "lego we use" in the Beowulf community is largely
> what is produced for other much larger markets and while we would like
> to see some things done differently, there is a reasonable
> trade-off between cost/flexibility/performance.
The turn-key clusters of 16 nodes and greater targeted at high speed
with high bandwith/low latency interconnects seems to be where things
can be improved significantly. Maybe some new "legos" are needed.
>
> I find it interesting that in all the talk of P4 systems
> there is little discussion about the Intel chips-set
> for the P4 only supporting 32 PCI. If you need anything
> other than Fast Ethernet this could be a real drawback
> (i.e. an imbalanced system with bottle necks)
> The new Xeon chip set has 2 64-bit slots. Of course there
> are other chip-sets on the immediate horizon, but
> the market seems to be making a clear differentiation about the
> "desktop" vs. "server" product.
Some applications will churn away at a piece of data for hours or days
before spitting out a few bits to pass on or compare to what the other
nodes have as results. A 300bps link between nodes may be adequate here.
Other applications may only run through a few CPU cycles before passing
on a chunk of data where even 10Gb/sec interconnections are bottlenecks.
It's this high speed end of clustering where I see a need for improvements.
I have seen interest in the P4 for it's raw performance only and not for
the lack of current support for DDR and 64/66 PCI. It's all around the
corner though from all the chipset vendors. Infinband will really make a
big difference for high speed and high bandwidth applications when it
comes standard in chipsets.
Bari
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